The Same Law, Two Different Filing Systems
Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act in 2012. Every member of the House and Senate falls under the same core rule: report any securities transaction over $1,000 within 45 days of the trade, on a Periodic Transaction Report. The reported amount is always a range, not a precise dollar figure, which is one of the law's known limitations.
That shared baseline is where the similarities end. The House and Senate run separate filing systems, separate portals, and slightly different document formats. Knowing the difference matters if you want to track a specific member or pull disclosures for a stock you already hold.
House Disclosures: The Clerk's Office Portal
House members file with the Office of the Clerk. The public database lives at disclosures-clerk.house.gov. Once there, you can search by member name or browse filings by year. No account is required. Most documents are filed as PDFs, and the Clerk's office has improved structured data availability in recent years, though the experience is still document-heavy.
Filings show the member's name, the asset, whether it was a purchase or sale, the date range, and the dollar range. Spousal and dependent transactions are included if they meet the threshold.
45-day window. A member who traded on June 1 has until roughly July 16 to file. Filings are timestamped when received, not when the trade occurred, so the most recent disclosures in the database can lag real-world activity by several weeks.
Senate Disclosures: The eFD Search Portal
Senate members file through the Electronic Financial Disclosure system at efdsearch.senate.gov. The Senate portal sits behind a brief agreement screen. Visitors must click through a terms-of-use notice before the search interface appears. It takes about five seconds and requires no account creation.
The Senate search lets you filter by name, filer type, and report type. Periodic Transaction Reports are the filings to look for when tracking trades. The document format differs slightly from the House version but covers the same required fields: asset description, transaction type, transaction date, notification date, and the dollar range bucket.
One structural difference worth knowing: the Senate has historically been slower to mandate electronic filing. Older Senate PTRs may appear as scanned documents rather than structured data, which makes bulk analysis harder. More recent filings have improved considerably.
Dollar ranges obscure size. The STOCK Act requires disclosure of ranges, not exact amounts. A senator could have sold anywhere from $1,001 to $15,000 in a given transaction. Trades of $1 million or more carry their own range bucket. You can see direction and timing, but not precise position size.
Why the Split System Exists
The House and Senate are constitutionally separate chambers with their own administrative infrastructure. The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate each run their own offices. When the STOCK Act passed, disclosure requirements were layered onto existing administrative structures rather than unified into a single federal clearinghouse. Several legislative proposals over the years have pushed for a unified portal, but as of now both systems remain independent.
Aggregators and Tools That Merge Both Feeds
Checking two portals manually, especially for tracking multiple tickers or dozens of members, adds friction. That is why third-party aggregators exist. Services pull from both the House Clerk and the Senate eFD system and surface the combined feed in a single interface.
ChartRead does this as part of its free congressional trade feed. Both House and Senate PTRs appear in one view, alongside SEC Form 4 insider filings, and each trade includes a one-tap chart read for the underlying stock. That means you can see the disclosure, check the chart pattern, and assess entry context without switching tools.
- House filings: direct search at disclosures-clerk.house.gov, no login required
- Senate filings: search at efdsearch.senate.gov, requires a brief terms-of-use click-through
- Both chambers: real-time aggregators merge the feeds and eliminate the need to check two systems separately
The data in both portals is public and free. The portals are functional but built for compliance, not for speed or analysis. Aggregators trade some latency for a much better experience if you are tracking more than one or two members at a time.
What You Cannot Get From Either Portal
The STOCK Act mandates disclosure, not transparency about intent. Neither filing tells you why a member traded. It does not confirm they had material non-public information. It does not show options activity unless the member holds options on individual securities (which must be disclosed separately under financial disclosure rules). And because amounts are ranges, position size is always approximate.
What the filings do give you is a verified public record of direction, timing, and asset class. Combined with price history and pattern analysis, that is enough to inform whether a disclosure is worth deeper research.
See what Congress is buying, free
ChartRead pulls House and Senate disclosures into one daily feed, with a one-tap chart read on any ticker a member just traded.
🏛️ Open the Congress Tracker